Yale — Philosophy and the Science of Human Nature — 13. Deontology

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Lecture 13 - Deontology [February 22, 2011]

Chapter 1. Bernard Williams’ Objection to Utilitarianism [00:00:00]

Professor Tamar Gendler: OK, so what I want to do today is to finish up the lecture that we were engaged with last week about utilitarianism and then to move on to what is perhaps the most dead-guy-on-Tuesday lecture of the semester, that is, an explanation of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. So in order to make up for the fact that the second part of the lecture is fairly dry, we'll have a couple of clicker questions in the first part of the lecture.

OK, so as you recall from our lecture last class, John Stuart Mill, in the selections from Utilitarianism that we read, says two extraordinarily famous things that serve in some ways as the heart of the utilitarian view. The first thing that he says is that he articulates what's known as the greatest happiness principle. This is a principle that's supposed to tell you what it is for an act to be morally right. And what Mill says is, there's a proportionality between the rightness of the act and something that it produces. In particular, a proportionality between the rightness of the act and the amount of happiness it produces, regardless of how that happiness is distributed. In particular he says “actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness,” they're “wrong as they tend to promote the reverse of happiness,” and the happiness with which we're concerned is not the agent's own happiness but “the happiness of all concerned.”

The second extraordinarily famous saying that he says in the opening passages of Utilitarianism is that the motive with which an act is performed is irrelevant to the act's moral worth. He says the motive has nothing to do with the morality of the action. “He who saves another creature from drowning does what is morally right, whether his motive be duty or the hope of being paid for it.”

So we might summarize what these principles say, as saying that the first one tells us that what matters for the morality of an act is the aggregate amount of happiness that it produces. And what we're concerned with here are aggregates, not individuals. We're interested in how much good is done overall, not where those pieces of good might happen to fall. And what the second principle tells us is that what the utilitarian, who is after all a consequentialist, is concerned with are consequences. They're interested in the outcome of the act, not the process by which that outcome was achieved.

So the first reading that we did for last class was a selection from Mill's Utilitarianism where he articulated these principles. And it's important to recognize that these get something profoundly right about what we're thinking about, I think, when we try to articulate what lies behind our moral judgments. It does seem right that what we're interested in is what the world is like after a particular action is taken, and to the extent that we're interested in what the world is like, our primary interest is not in how that state of affairs came about, but what that state of affairs is. And our primary concern, if we're taking a moral stance, is not in how much we ourselves have, but rather in how much good there is in the world overall.

That said, there have been, since utilitarianism was articulated, a classic set of objections which are raised to the view, some of which we'll talk more about today, and some of which we encountered in the selection from Bernard Williams that we read last class.